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arxiv: 2605.10082 · v1 · submitted 2026-05-11 · 💻 cs.CL · cs.LG

Recognition: 2 theorem links

· Lean Theorem

FERA: Uncertainty-Aware Federated Reasoning for Large Language Models

Authors on Pith no claims yet

Pith reviewed 2026-05-12 03:28 UTC · model grok-4.3

classification 💻 cs.CL cs.LG
keywords federated reasoninglarge language modelsuncertainty estimationiterative refinementmulti-step reasoningself-critique aggregationprivacy-preserving AI
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The pith

A server improves multi-step LLM reasoning by iteratively aggregating client traces weighted by their uncertainty estimates without accessing private data.

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

The paper introduces FERA, a training-free framework in which a server coordinates with clients holding private demonstration data to refine multi-step reasoning. Clients produce reasoning traces accompanied by lightweight uncertainty estimates for each step; the server then applies UA-SCA to weight contributions according to estimated reliability and to revise flawed steps through cross-client verification rather than discarding them. The refined output is sent back as context for the next round, creating an iterative loop that simultaneously improves server outputs and client-side performance. Theoretical analysis shows that the protocol converges and that uncertainty-aware weighting speeds convergence. Experiments on reasoning benchmarks confirm progressive accuracy gains while preserving communication and computation efficiency.

Core claim

FERA is an iterative server-client co-refinement protocol in which clients generate reasoning traces with per-step uncertainty estimates, the server synthesizes them via query-dependent trust weighting and structured cross-client verification to produce improved reasoning, and the improved traces are redistributed to clients for subsequent rounds, yielding convergence guarantees and higher accuracy on multi-step tasks.

What carries the argument

Uncertainty-Aware Self-Critique Aggregation (UA-SCA), which resolves conflicts among heterogeneous client traces through query-dependent trust weighting and revises flawed reasoning steps to recover useful information instead of discarding traces.

If this is right

  • The iterative protocol converges to progressively higher accuracy on multi-step reasoning tasks.
  • Uncertainty-aware weighting accelerates convergence compared with uniform aggregation.
  • Both server outputs and client-side reasoning improve across communication rounds.
  • The method maintains lower communication and computational cost than federated training approaches.
  • Performance exceeds both federated-training and training-free baselines on multiple reasoning benchmarks.

Where Pith is reading between the lines

These are editorial extensions of the paper, not claims the author makes directly.

  • The same uncertainty-weighted revision loop could be tested on non-reasoning tasks such as code generation or factual question answering where private demonstrations are similarly distributed.
  • If client uncertainty estimates remain reliable even when client models differ substantially in size or training data, the framework may scale to highly heterogeneous device fleets.
  • The revision step inside UA-SCA suggests a general pattern for turning noisy distributed signals into usable context without centralizing raw examples.

Load-bearing premise

Client-generated uncertainty estimates are sufficiently reliable and query-dependent for the server to correctly weight and revise traces without ever seeing the private demonstrations or raw data.

What would settle it

Run the iterative protocol on a standard reasoning benchmark while replacing client uncertainty estimates with random or constant values; if accuracy fails to improve across rounds or converges to the same level as unweighted aggregation, the uncertainty-aware mechanism does not drive the claimed gains.

Figures

Figures reproduced from arXiv: 2605.10082 by Chengkai Huang, Dongruo Zhou, Julian McAuley, Junda Wu, Lina Yao, Ruhan Wang, Rui Wang, Tong Yu, Zhiyong Wang.

Figure 1
Figure 1. Figure 1: Overview of the FERA framework. Over multiple rounds, the server distributes context to clients, who generate reasoning traces with uncertainty estimates from private data. The server refines its reasoning via UA-SCA and redistributes improved context, creating a co-refinement loop where both server outputs and client contexts improve simultaneously. Detailed explanations are provided in Section 4.2. • We … view at source ↗
Figure 2
Figure 2. Figure 2: Performance comparison of FERA and its variants against baseline methods on the MMLU￾PRO benchmark under varying levels of client-level data heterogeneity (α ∈ {1.0, 10, 100}) [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p007_2.png] view at source ↗
Figure 5
Figure 5. Figure 5: Effect of interaction round count on FERA and FERA-Free in the MMLU-Pro bench￾mark. External Baselines. We evaluate FERA against two categories of baselines: feder￾ated learning (FL) methods and parameter￾free methods. The FL baselines include Fe￾dAvg (McMahan et al., 2017; Ye et al., 2024) and FloRA (Wang et al., 2024c), while the parameter-free baseline is LLM-Debate (Du et al., 2023). In addition, we co… view at source ↗
Figure 6
Figure 6. Figure 6: Illustration of UA-WA. For a given query, multiple clients generate candidate [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p019_6.png] view at source ↗
Figure 7
Figure 7. Figure 7: Client dataset distribution under different [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p032_7.png] view at source ↗
Figure 8
Figure 8. Figure 8: Performance comparison of FERA and its variants against baseline methods on the MMLU￾PRO benchmark under varying degrees of client-level data heterogeneity, using Qwen3-4B as the base model. Client data heterogeneity is simulated via a Dirichlet distribution with concentration parameter α ∈ [1.0, 10, 100], where smaller α values correspond to more severe heterogeneity across clients and larger values indic… view at source ↗
Figure 10
Figure 10. Figure 10: Effect of interaction round count on the performance of FERA and FERA-Free in the MMLU-Pro benchmark. The Dirichlet concentration parameter is set to α = 10.0 to simulate moderate client-level data heterogeneity. All experiments use Qwen3-4B as the client model [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p036_10.png] view at source ↗
Figure 11
Figure 11. Figure 11: Effect of model-capacity heterogeneity on FERA performance for the MMLU-Pro bench￾mark [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p036_11.png] view at source ↗
Figure 13
Figure 13. Figure 13: Performance of FERA under Varying Client Reasoning Response Quality. 36 [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p036_13.png] view at source ↗
Figure 15
Figure 15. Figure 15: FERA performance in a specialized-domain setting on the MMLU-Pro law category. Client models use Qwen3-4B, and the server model is GPT-4o-mini [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p037_15.png] view at source ↗
Figure 16
Figure 16. Figure 16: Performance of FERA under different demonstration selection strategies across MMLU￾Pro, AQUA-RAT, and GSM8K. GPT-4o-mini API exposes response-level scores (log-probability–based confidences), which we use directly to compute uncertainty for our Uncertainty-Aware Demonstration Selection and Uncertainty-Aware Aggregation, without any additional reward/critic model. This keeps the uncertainty signal aligned … view at source ↗
Figure 18
Figure 18. Figure 18: Effect of the number of demonstrations on FERA-Q perfor￾mance for MMLU-Pro and AQUA-RAT benchmarks [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p038_18.png] view at source ↗
Figure 20
Figure 20. Figure 20: Effect of the number of clients on FERA-Q performance for MMLU-Pro and AQUA-RAT bench￾marks. question-only baselines. This performance gain highlights the effectiveness of combining MMR’s relevance-diversity trade-off with the adaptive selector’s incorporation of broader contextual signals beyond simple question similarity. Effect of Demonstration Quantity. We investigate the impact of the number of conte… view at source ↗
Figure 21
Figure 21. Figure 21: Comparison of token-level and semantic uncertainty. [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p039_21.png] view at source ↗
Figure 22
Figure 22. Figure 22: Privacy Analysis 41 [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p041_22.png] view at source ↗
Figure 23
Figure 23. Figure 23: Example Reasoning Answer iterative update for Query 1 [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p042_23.png] view at source ↗
Figure 24
Figure 24. Figure 24: Example Reasoning Answer iterative update for Query 2 [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p043_24.png] view at source ↗
Figure 25
Figure 25. Figure 25: Example Reasoning Answer iterative update for Query 3 [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p044_25.png] view at source ↗
read the original abstract

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong reasoning capabilities when guided by high-quality demonstrations, yet such data is often distributed across organizations that cannot centralize it due to regulatory, proprietary, or institutional constraints. We study federated reasoning, where a server improves multi-step reasoning by coordinating with heterogeneous clients holding private demonstrations, without centralized training or raw data sharing. The key challenge is that client reliability is query-dependent, while the server cannot inspect client data to determine which contributions are trustworthy. To address this, we propose Uncertainty-Aware Federated Reasoning (FERA), a training-free framework based on iterative server-client co-refinement. Across communication rounds, clients generate reasoning traces with lightweight uncertainty estimates, and the server synthesizes them into improved reasoning that is redistributed as context for the next round, progressively improving both server outputs and client-side reasoning. Within each round, Uncertainty-Aware Self-Critique Aggregation (UA-SCA) resolves conflicts among heterogeneous client traces through query-dependent trust weighting and structured cross-client verification. Rather than simply discarding low-quality traces, UA-SCA revises flawed reasoning steps to recover useful information. We provide theoretical guarantees showing that the proposed iterative protocol converges and that uncertainty-aware weighting accelerates convergence. Experiments on multiple reasoning benchmarks show that FERA consistently outperforms both federated training and training-free baselines, achieving progressively higher accuracy across rounds while maintaining communication and computational efficiency.

Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, simulated authors' rebuttal, and a circularity audit. Tearing a paper down is the easy half of reading it; the pith above is the substance, this is the friction.

Referee Report

2 major / 2 minor

Summary. The paper proposes Uncertainty-Aware Federated Reasoning (FERA), a training-free iterative framework in which a server coordinates with heterogeneous clients holding private demonstrations to improve multi-step LLM reasoning. Clients produce reasoning traces with lightweight uncertainty estimates; the server applies Uncertainty-Aware Self-Critique Aggregation (UA-SCA) to weight traces query-dependently, revise flawed steps, and redistribute improved context for subsequent rounds. The manuscript claims theoretical convergence of the protocol together with acceleration from uncertainty-aware weighting, and reports progressive accuracy gains on reasoning benchmarks while preserving communication and computational efficiency.

Significance. If the central claims hold, FERA offers a practical route to collaborative reasoning across organizations that cannot share raw data, extending federated learning ideas to training-free, iterative refinement of reasoning traces. The combination of query-dependent trust weighting and structured revision (rather than simple discarding) is a distinctive technical contribution; the stated theoretical guarantees, if rigorously established, would further strengthen the work.

major comments (2)
  1. [§4] §4 (Theoretical Guarantees): The convergence proof and the claim that uncertainty-aware weighting accelerates convergence rest on the assumption that client-generated uncertainty estimates are sufficiently correlated with actual reasoning-step error rates. No empirical measurement or ablation isolating this correlation (e.g., uncertainty vs. ground-truth error on held-out traces) is reported, which is load-bearing for both the theoretical acceleration result and the practical utility of UA-SCA.
  2. [§5] §5 (Experiments): The reported progressive accuracy improvements across communication rounds are central to the empirical claim, yet the manuscript provides neither per-round standard deviations, the number of clients, nor details on how client heterogeneity was simulated. Without these, it is impossible to judge whether the gains are robust or could be explained by uniform aggregation alone.
minor comments (2)
  1. [§3.1] §3.1: The notation distinguishing UA-SCA from standard self-critique aggregation would be clearer if accompanied by a compact algorithmic box or numbered steps.
  2. [Figure 2] Figure 2: Axis labels and legend entries are too small for readability; consider enlarging or splitting into two panels.

Simulated Author's Rebuttal

2 responses · 0 unresolved

We thank the referee for the constructive comments, which help clarify the presentation of our theoretical and empirical results. We address each major comment below.

read point-by-point responses
  1. Referee: [§4] §4 (Theoretical Guarantees): The convergence proof and the claim that uncertainty-aware weighting accelerates convergence rest on the assumption that client-generated uncertainty estimates are sufficiently correlated with actual reasoning-step error rates. No empirical measurement or ablation isolating this correlation (e.g., uncertainty vs. ground-truth error on held-out traces) is reported, which is load-bearing for both the theoretical acceleration result and the practical utility of UA-SCA.

    Authors: We agree that the acceleration claim in the convergence analysis relies on a positive correlation between the lightweight uncertainty estimates and per-step error rates. The formal convergence guarantee itself holds under the stated assumption without requiring a specific correlation strength, but the acceleration result does depend on it. While the end-to-end experiments show consistent gains from UA-SCA over uniform aggregation, we acknowledge that an explicit correlation analysis was not included. In the revision we will add an ablation that reports the correlation coefficient and a scatter plot of uncertainty scores versus ground-truth step errors on held-out traces from the reasoning benchmarks, thereby directly supporting the practical utility of the weighting mechanism. revision: yes

  2. Referee: [§5] §5 (Experiments): The reported progressive accuracy improvements across communication rounds are central to the empirical claim, yet the manuscript provides neither per-round standard deviations, the number of clients, nor details on how client heterogeneity was simulated. Without these, it is impossible to judge whether the gains are robust or could be explained by uniform aggregation alone.

    Authors: We appreciate this observation. The experimental section states the number of clients (K=5) and describes heterogeneity via partitioning of demonstration pools by domain and difficulty, but we agree that per-round standard deviations and a more explicit description of the simulation procedure are needed for full reproducibility and to isolate the effect of uncertainty-aware weighting. In the revised manuscript we will expand the experimental setup subsection with these details and add per-round standard deviations (computed over 5 random seeds) to all accuracy tables and figures. This will allow direct comparison against uniform aggregation baselines and demonstrate that the observed progressive gains exceed what would be expected from averaging alone. revision: yes

Circularity Check

0 steps flagged

No circularity; derivation introduces independent components and assumptions

full rationale

The paper defines FERA as a novel training-free iterative protocol with UA-SCA for query-dependent weighting and revision of client traces. Theoretical convergence guarantees are stated as holding under the assumption that client uncertainty estimates correlate with reasoning quality, but this is an explicit modeling assumption rather than a self-referential definition or fitted parameter renamed as prediction. No equations or steps reduce by construction to inputs; no self-citations are load-bearing for the core claims; the framework adds new mechanisms (iterative redistribution, structured verification) without renaming known results or smuggling ansatzes via prior work. The derivation chain remains self-contained against external benchmarks.

Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger

0 free parameters · 0 axioms · 1 invented entities

Abstract-only; no explicit free parameters, axioms, or invented entities beyond the named components FERA and UA-SCA are visible. The convergence guarantee implicitly rests on unstated assumptions about uncertainty estimate quality and client heterogeneity.

invented entities (1)
  • Uncertainty-Aware Self-Critique Aggregation (UA-SCA) no independent evidence
    purpose: Resolves conflicts among heterogeneous client reasoning traces via query-dependent trust weighting and structured verification
    New aggregation procedure introduced to handle query-dependent reliability without data inspection

pith-pipeline@v0.9.0 · 5568 in / 1192 out tokens · 44212 ms · 2026-05-12T03:28:18.285907+00:00 · methodology

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Reference graph

Works this paper leans on

52 extracted references · 52 canonical work pages

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    X must be the option letter only (A/B/C/D/. . . ). Do not include the option text

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    Question:{query} Answer:Let’s think step by step.{text} Server Query Initialization Prompt for MMLU-Pro & AQUA-RAT Standard QA Benchmark You are taking a multiple-choice question

    Keep your entire response within{token limit}tokens. Question:{query} Answer:Let’s think step by step.{text} Server Query Initialization Prompt for MMLU-Pro & AQUA-RAT Standard QA Benchmark You are taking a multiple-choice question. Read the following question carefully and select the single best answer. Do not explain your reasoning. Output only the fina...

  3. [4]

    ) with no punctuation or extra text

    The output must be a single uppercase letter (A/B/C/D/. . . ) with no punctuation or extra text. 26

  4. [5]

    Do not include any explanation or content after the answer

  5. [6]

    Question:{query} Answer: Server Query Initialization Prompt for GSM8K Reasoning Benchmark You are a knowledgeable assistant

    Keep the response within{token limit}tokens. Question:{query} Answer: Server Query Initialization Prompt for GSM8K Reasoning Benchmark You are a knowledgeable assistant. For the following math question, briefly explain your reasoning (no more than{sentences limit}sentences), then end with the exact sentence: The answer is X. Rules:

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    Do not include any content after the final sentence

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    Question:{query} Answer: Let’s think step by step

    Keep the entire response within{token limit}tokens. Question:{query} Answer: Let’s think step by step. D.2 Client Response Generation for Server Queries The framework of FERA is outlined in Algorithm 2. In Step 2, each client relabels its local data by constructing prompts that incorporate demonstrations selected from the server dataset. In Step 3, the cl...

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    Provide clear, concise, and logically coherent step-by-step reasoning (at most {sentences limit}sentences)

  9. [12]

    End with the exact sentence: The answer is (X)

  10. [13]

    ); do not include the option text

    X must be the option letter only (A, B, C, D, . . . ); do not include the option text

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    Examples: {examples} Question: {query} Answer:Let’s think step by step

    Keep the complete response within{token limit}tokens. Examples: {examples} Question: {query} Answer:Let’s think step by step. 27 Client Prediction Prompt for MMLU-Pro & AQUA-RAT Standard QA Benchmark You are taking a multiple-choice question. Below are several example questions with their final answers. After reviewing these examples, you will be presente...

  12. [16]

    Read the question carefully and select the single best answer

  13. [17]

    Do not explain your reasoning

  14. [18]

    ); do not include the option text

    Output only the final answer choice letter (A, B, C, D, . . . ); do not include the option text

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    Examples: {examples} Question: {query} Answer: Client Prediction Prompt for GSM8K Reasoning Benchmark You are tasked with answering math questions in this domain

    Do not include any additional content after the answer. Examples: {examples} Question: {query} Answer: Client Prediction Prompt for GSM8K Reasoning Benchmark You are tasked with answering math questions in this domain. Below are several example questions with their step-by-step reasoning and final answers. After reviewing these examples, you will be prese...

  16. [20]

    Provide clear, concise, and logically coherent step-by-step reasoning

  17. [21]

    End your response with the exact sentence: The answer is X

  18. [22]

    X must be a single numeric value (e.g., 12, -3/5, 7.25); no units or extra text

  19. [23]

    If X is a fraction, reduce it to simplest terms; if a decimal, use standard form without trailing zeros

  20. [24]

    Include no additional content after the final answer sentence

  21. [25]

    Examples: {examples} Question: {query} Answer:Let’s think step by step

    Keep the complete response within{token limit}tokens. Examples: {examples} Question: {query} Answer:Let’s think step by step. D.3 Uncertainty-Aware Aggregration In the FERA framework, Uncertainty-Aware Aggregation is employed on the server side to combine responses from clients. The weights used in this aggregation are first computed ac- cording to Equati...

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    Synthesize the distinguishing features of these reasoning responses

  23. [27]

    Emphasize their reasoning methodology and structural organization

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    Identify common problem-solving paradigms across responses

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    Present your analysis within{token limit}tokens

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    Capture the essential cognitive characteristics of this cluster Your Analysis: SelfCritique for MMLU-Pro and AQUA-RAT Benchamrk You are improving a reasoning response by incorporating insights from conflicting reasoning approaches. Original Question: {question} Target Reasoning Response (to be improved): {target response} Alternative Approaches Summary: {...

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    Use the target reasoning response as your foundation

  28. [32]

    Extract valuable insights from the alternative approaches

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    Integrate these insights to create a more comprehensive response

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    Conclude with: ‘‘The answer is (X)’’ where X is the option letter only (A/B/C/D/...)

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    Exclude option text after the letter

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    Omit meta-commentary or explanatory analysis Improved Response: SelfCritique for GSM8K Benchamrk You are improving a reasoning response by incorporating insights from conflicting reasoning approaches. Original Question: {question} Target Reasoning Response (to be improved): {target response} 29 Alternative Approaches Summary: {alternatives formatted} Task...

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    Start with the target reasoning as your foundation

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    Identify useful insights from the conflicting summaries that could improve the reasoning

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    Integrate these insights to create a stronger, more comprehensive reasoning

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    Maintain logical consistency throughout

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    Present only the final improved reasoning

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    The answer is X

    End with "The answer is X"

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    Limit response to{token limit}tokens

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    Context: You are given several reasoning responses to the same question, each from a different client

    No meta-commentary or analysis explanation Improved Response: Aggregation for MMLU-Pro and AQUA-RAT Benchmark You are synthesizing multiple reasoning responses to create a single, unified reasoning path. Context: You are given several reasoning responses to the same question, each from a different client. A final answer has been determined by majority vot...

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    30 Context: You are given several reasoning responses to the same question, each from a different client

    Maintain professional and logical coherence throughout Merged Reasoning Response: Aggregation for MMLU-Pro and AQUA-RAT Benchmark You are synthesizing multiple reasoning responses to create a single, unified reasoning path. 30 Context: You are given several reasoning responses to the same question, each from a different client. Each response includes a co...

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    End with: ‘‘The answer is (X)’’ where X is the option letter only (A/B/C/D/...)

  43. [60]

    Do not include the option text after the letter

  44. [61]

    Context: You are given several reasoning responses to the same question, each from a different client

    Maintain professional and logical coherence throughout Merged Reasoning Response: Aggregation for GSM8K Benchmark You are synthesizing multiple reasoning responses to create a single, unified solution path. Context: You are given several reasoning responses to the same question, each from a different client. Each response includes a confidence score (high...

  45. [62]

    Synthesize the reasoning leading to the final answer

  46. [63]

    Give greater weight to reasoning from higher-confidence responses

  47. [64]

    Avoid unnecessary repetition or irrelevant details

  48. [65]

    Keep the ENTIRE response (reasoning + final answer) within{token limit}tokens

  49. [66]

    End with the exact sentence: ‘‘The answer is X.’’

  50. [67]

    X must be a single numeric value (e.g., 12, -3/5, 7.25)

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    bert-base-NER

    No units or extra text after the answer Merged Reasoning Response: D.4 FERA Variants FERA-GT.To evaluate the effectiveness of FERA, we compare it with a simplified baseline, FERA-GT. In this baseline, the server issues a query to clients, who independently retrieve the top-C question–answer pairs using the MMR demonstration strategy. These retrieved pairs...

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    gpt-4o", messages=[ {

    to both the original server prompts and the client-generated reasoning response. Following the methodology of Edemacu & Wu (2025), we measured how often response contained personal identifiers not already present in the original prompts. The results, summarized in Table 2, show that only a small fraction of response included such identifiers, indicating t...